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Monthly Archives: March 2016

In my previous blogpost I wrote on improving the Sitecore logs, which was a prerequisite for this blogpost, to send all that logging information to Application Insights. This blogpost will explain the steps on how to do this. Application Insights is a tool, hosted on Azure, which helps to get a 360-view on your application. It tracks application health, adoption metrics and crash data. With several interactive tools it’s possible to filter out, segment data and drill down into event instances for details. With a few clicks, it’s possible to view the whole logged call-stack of your application. In this blogpost, I will explain how to send your logs to Application Insights. The great thing is: The is not limited to your custom logs, but the full stack of logs, thus custom and Sitecore logs, will show up in this tool. This platform is not limited to Microsoft, there are a lot of SDK’s available for other technologies.

Lately, I have been working on improving he Sitecore Logging Experience™. Sitecore uses the log4net framework to handle all kinds of logs, but, with the standard configuration and implementation, we’re not making the most out of it. Where Alex Shyba wrote some excellent posts on writing your logs to SQL to make the logs easier accessible, I am going to take the logging capabilities to the next level! In this blogpost I will describe why the out of the box Sitecore logging implementation should be improved, how to do this and eventually I’ll show how to modify the appenders to show some extra trace information. This is all a step-up to my next blogpost, I will explain how all the Sitecore logs can be send to application insights on azure to get even better insights in your application usage!